The present invention relates to handheld diagnostic tools, and more particularly, to handheld automotive diagnostic tools which display language characters derived from graphically-based bitmapped character sets, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts.
There are a wide array of automotive diagnostic tools available today. One specialized sector of the market includes handheld diagnostic devices and code readers which are compatible with standardized platforms, such as OBD-I/II protocol systems. Many of these handheld automotive devices have simple and economical designs which are targeted for use by do-it-yourself mechanics. One ongoing challenge in creating such niche market devices is being able to provide the consumer more features/functionality, while maintaining the cost per unit to a minimum. To provide additional features, typically faster processors, sophisticated programming and more memory is required. As a result, the cost to manufacture the handheld devices typically increases.
This problem is even further magnified when the device is required to display data in graphic-oriented character bitmaps, instead of conventional binary characters (such as ASCII type characters) which utilize significantly less memory. For instance, most East Asian languages are generated via bitmaps character sets. Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts have extremely large character sets, typically ranging anywhere from 7,000 to 18,000 characters. As a result, Asian fonts typically require about 6-12 MB of memory for storage. Such a memory requirement is quite often too large for handheld automotive diagnostic devices which are targeted to be competively and/or economically priced for consumer's having limited financial resources.
Currently there are numerous commercially and freely available graphically-based bitmapped character/font sets in many different font file formats for a variety of languages which can be utilized in the handheld diagnostic devices. The most prevalently used East Asian languages having graphically-based bitmapped character/font sets includes Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Generic Chinese and Vietnamese. For each of the aforementioned languages, graphically-based bitmapped character/font sets have been developed for displaying communications on computer based systems. For instance, available Japanese code sets based in Kanji include the following graphic-based code sets: Japanese JIS Codes, Taiwanese Big5, Taiwanese CNS, CCCII and EACC.
The first character code designed to make the processing of ideographic characters on computers possible was the JIS C 6226-1978. This standard was updated with an additional set of 5800 characters which created the JIS X 0208-1990 code set. Big5 defines 13051 Chinese characters, arranged in two parts according to their frequency of usage. The arrangement within these parts is by number of strokes, then Kangxi radical. CNS X-11643-1986 and CNS X-11643-1992 is the Chinese National Code for Taiwan. In the form published in 1992, it defines the glyph-shape, stroke count and radical heading for 48027 characters. CCCII is a very large codeset developed and maintained by the Chinese Character Research Group in Taipei. CCCII currently defines 75000 code points. UNICODE is the upcoming new standard not only for East Asian but for a large number of other scripts of the world.
It would be desirable to provide a handheld automotive diagnostic device for displaying any of the aforementioned bitmapped graphic character sets which utilizes a minimum amount of memory to store at least portions of the graphic character sets. In particular, it would be beneficial to provide a handheld automotive device and method for efficiently storing selected characters from large East Asian language character sets, such as Chinese, Japanese and/or Korean character sets or any other language which may be displayed by bitmaps.